We recently migrated our back-end data processing services to a new version of the One Platform. The updates were made in response to user feedback, capacity/performance needs and extensibility planning - the result is a rocket under the hood that gives the platform scalability in all dimensions.

Texas Instruments came out with a neat $49 Chronos ez430 Wireless Watch Development Kit.  The dev kit is based on their low-power wireless + processor ez430 chipset but looks/works just like a real watch. Check out the public dashboard.

One piece of information that we often take for granted is the temperature. In Minnesota especially where winters are extremely cold while summers can be hot, the temperature is always a talking point, be it on the news or small talk with people you meet on the street. With the temperature on my mind (the temp is 13 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping as I type) I took an Arduino prototyping platform and decided to create a really simple web-enabled temperature device.

I get this question a lot - right after I think I've done a good job describing what we do at Exosite.  So, here it is:

We make it really easy for people to put sensor data on a web page.

Sure, it is a lot more than that, and it has a lot of ramifications, but that seems to be a good marriage of accuracy and digestibility.  A general way of saying could be: "We provide the software and interfaces to meaningfully connect data providers to information subscribers."

We here at Exosite have been working in the embedded systems and product design industry for over 20 years.  We've worked with it all - medical devices that are saving and sustaining lives, dual-redundant kill switches that know if a hot dog is posing as a finger, multi-channel oscopes that can tell when your car has the 1:100,000 manufacturer recall problem, massive electro magnets that count the new year's salmon run, golf ball tracking devices that never made it past spec - some really cool products and ideas.  One thing these devices all had in common - adding connectivity opens up new horizons on what can be done.

Our last announcement mentioned that Exosite Portals has the ability to make your dashboards public. Now we have created a list of public dashboards where you can view live data others are monitoring.

We’ve just updated Exosite Portals to 0.4.0.

We’ve just updated Exosite Portals to support multiple views-per-portal. This allows you to expose the data flowing in and out of the Portal in different ways for the different people who will be looking at it.

We’ve added an XMPP message interface to the OpenTether communication interfaces in the form of a chat bot named “Commander.”

The Exosite One management interface has been rebranded as “Exosite Portals” and released in beta at one.exosite.com. The back-end still supports the same devices, but the front-end now has an extensible menu structure with features previously only available to Exosite folks. Signup, login, try it out.